The Winter Road

by Kate Holden

  Thirty years later, farming culture had changed, and Turnbull followed suit. About 80 per cent of people, Smith believes, will comply with regulations. But ‘there are those risk-takers’. In 2012, grazing land in the Moree district was there to be converted. Powerful landowners had recently had significant and conspicuous wins over the EPA, and the weaknesses of the system had been exposed. ‘People were looking at these cases,’ explains Smith. ‘They weren’t seeing a regulatory response to it; they were seeing a massive amount of money being made in capital value. They thought, Shit, if they can do it, why can’t I?’

  Turnbull, reflects Smith, ‘had seen that the benefits were very high’. It wasn’t about healthy land, or a relationship with place, anymore. It was about the social landscape around him and the temptation of a huge profit in the short term. And the laws might change under OEH management, ‘so what the hell: why not? Why wouldn’t you take the risk and clear?’

  Turnbull was not insensitive to land conservation, but his focus was on the soil beneath him. He could see ahead, to his grandsons profiting from those blocks; he could see what was in front of him, his neighbours driving dozers over scrub. And he could see Glen Turner standing at his gate, watching him, threatening ruin to the small empire he had built.

  A WEEK LATER, TURNER returned with a stop-work order. He tried to give it to ‘Ivan’ to hand on, but the man wouldn’t take it. Ivan Maas had worked for Turnbull for many years, as had his son Robbie. Maas, Turner wrote in his notes, watched him resentfully as he noted the refusal to sign for receipt of the order. Turner shrugged and got back in his car.

  Years later, when the defence was alleging that Turner had a tendency to make threats, to harass, to stalk, Maas said Turner called his house several times and left menacing messages threatening jail; came to his very home with the stop-work order. ‘I felt very confronted by him,’ Maas would complain. But that day on the property Turner had gone straight to Turnbull instead, driving back down County Boundary Road and up the long, dry driveway of ‘Yambin’ to the distant group of silos where the old house was, surrounded by a margin of green lawn in a pale brown world. He found his man.

  They met on the verandah in the hot March air. Robeena was there too, but there was no offer of a cup of tea. Turnbull raised the subject of Roger, and accused Turner of harassing his son the previous year. Roger’s wife, Annette, had had to call the police, Turnbull said angrily. Roger had had to go on medication for depression. I’m on it for the same reason, Turner unexpectedly confided, according to Turnbull.

  Turnbull wouldn’t sign for receipt of the stop-work order either. Turner took the order, unsigned, and left. Turnbull’s solicitor, Sylvester Joseph at Roger Butler’s chambers, wrote to the OEH and demanded that all further communications be through him.

  Turner was the man on the ground, but he was only doing as instructed. Turner, insists Nadolny, was diligent, priding himself on being fair and reasonable, on fulfilling his responsibilities. He had an excellent record as an officer, though not all landowners were inclined to admire it – Turner had sustained injuries in the course of his work when one irate landowner seized the keys to his ute and rammed him with a quad bike. ‘Glen was just doing his job,’ says Nadolny. ‘Doing it by the book. Trying to be as careful as anything.’ Turner’s work notebooks contain lines of dialogue, precise GPS readings, every photo, records of each catalogue item of evidence.

  Meanwhile, Turnbull called Simon Smith in his new office at the EPA, hoping his former conservation farming ally would assist. ‘“Simon, Simon,” he said, “you have to stop this! I’m a good person!” I didn’t talk to him,’ Smith recalls soberly. ‘I left a message saying, “If Ian Turnbull rings, tell him I can’t deal with this matter anymore. It’s not my responsibility.”’

  He should have called him back, Smith now reflects: arranged a meeting with Turnbull and the OEH, been a liaison. ‘I knew Ian Turnbull, I had respect for him, I knew I could talk to him.’ Smith, who’d lived in Moree himself, wasn’t scared of an angry farmer; he believed in courteous disagreement and rational argument. And he knew Turnbull was frustrated, looking for someone to talk to. ‘But I didn’t do that. I sort of …’ His deep voice fades. ‘I do sort of kick myself: I threw the bomb over the fence, knowing I wouldn’t have to be responsible for it. Hmm. Poor judgement.’ A pause. He imagines a conversation with Turnbull, quieter voices prevailing. ‘I probably should have done that.’

  THE BATTLE LINES WERE being drawn. First Roger, now Cory and Grant: it seemed all the Turnbulls were having a go at what looked like potential law infringements. Roger was already fighting from his corner. Cory and Grant were silent or away, but had Turnbull, the old bull, the patriarch, as their spokesman. His word was that they had had a nod from Luc Farago of the Catchment Management Authority, and what they were clearing on ‘Strathdoon’ was basically regrowth. He wasn’t going to have anyone, not even Farago himself, tell him otherwise.

  Turner organised another letter for Turnbull, pointing out his legal responsibilities, this time signed by his new boss at the OEH. A week later, Turner and Nadolny returned to take another look at the properties. Turner stood in the same places that Farago had, took photos, compared them. Clearing seemed to have halted, but there’d been some tilling in preparation for sowing of crops, and the precious grasses and groundcover had been ploughed. Where there had been protected native scrub, there was now cleared land. Nadolny and Turner grimaced.

  Meanwhile, Turnbull got extra hands to help clean up the place before the stop-work order came into effect. With six blokes working hard, they’d have it done.

  Next, the OEH requested to speak with Cory. Turner didn’t get much out of him in the formal interview – which was held in the Turnbulls’ lawyers’ offices, Cole & Butler in Moree – but afterwards he got the young man to admit that his grandfather mostly got his way on the property. ‘He’s guaranteed the loan, so it’s hard to disagree with him,’ Cory conceded. Then Turner got Grant in. He didn’t get much from him, either. But just a few days later, by the end of March, Turner learned that Turnbull had lodged an appeal to the stop-work order in the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales.

  Turner went back to look around the properties yet again at the end of April, when he was in the area. He reckoned there’d been more clearing, ploughing, pushing fallen trees around. It was pouring rain, according to Turnbull’s testimony years later. Both he and Grant were there on ‘Colorado’ when Turner allegedly said to Turnbull, ‘I have a strong dislike for your son, Roger,’ and, turning to Grant, added, ‘And I’m starting to get a strong dislike for you.’ According to Turnbull, Turner grew more and more agitated. The rain thrashed harder, and eventually the exasperated compliance officer left.

  Turner made no mention of any encounter in his usually meticulous notes. There were no other witnesses to verify events.

  In May, Turnbull got the stop-work order revoked on a technical matter. Simon Smith admits it had been ‘rushed’. The OEH, new to this kind of enforcement, didn’t even try to challenge his appeal, not wanting to waste taxpayers’ money on the case and thinking a win unlikely. The department had been distracted: it was a failure of communication in a large organisation in the midst of huge structural revision. Six months later, the state minister for the environment would be closely questioned in parliamentary Budget Estimates on how this happened. But in the meantime, instead of warning the family off further transgressions, the OEH had unwittingly encouraged them. Prosecution, it appeared, would be hesitant.

  ‘I was very disappointed,’ remembers Simon Smith. That stop-work order could have been revised and resubmitted. ‘I had no power to do anything anymore. I left the whole matter with Glen and his supervisors.’

  At the end of May, the stop-work order was lifted. The Turnbulls boasted to neighbours that they’d get a new dozer, to catch up on lost time.

  But Turner was back in the district again in June, inspecting another potential case of illegal clearing
towards Boggabilla. On his way to a Moree motel, he went down County Boundary Road. Glancing to the left as he passed ‘Strathdoon’, he could see a new crop. He stopped the ute. He didn’t go in, just took photos from the road.

  A few weeks later, he got the call from the anonymous tipster. The Turnbulls were clearing again.

  3

  Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

  —John Locke, 1690, quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald, 1839, to justify European possession of the Australian continent

  The first white man to the Moree district was a fugitive. He’d escaped his master and taken to the bush. The local people supposed, very reasonably, he was a ghost.

  George Clarke, known as ‘The Barber’, was young, handsome, clever, charismatic. When he reappeared in Sydney in 1831 with the ritual markings and tattoos of a full warrior, his skin blackened, one of his Aboriginal wives was by his side. For nearly three years he had been outside the white world. In those lands, not yet twenty-five years old to those in the colony, he was a king. He spoke of a great river and fertile lands. Astonished, the colony listened.

  Clarke, from Worcestershire, had been transported for petty theft. Life in Australia had begun excitingly, with being shipwrecked on a sandbar for six weeks. Back on solid land, he was assigned to Benjamin Singleton, reportedly a respectful master. But Clarke fled north and was taken into a tribe, initiated and endowed with several wives. He learned language. He attended bora ceremonies, probably at the bora ground near Terry Hie Hie. And he erected a bark hut and a stockyard of saplings and stretched hide to keep rustled European stock at what’s still called Barbers Lagoon, on an anabranch of the Namoi River. It was his former master Singleton’s cattle he stole.

  By the 1830s, the remote badlands were becoming more settled and Clarke turned himself in, along with his tribe. Singleton, showing munificence, had never reported Clarke missing, and put his ornamental convict back to work. But he listened, enthralled, to the tales Clarke told him of the Kindur river and the rich plains beyond it to the north.

  An expedition was arranged. They didn’t get far, because Clarke fled once more with his tribe. This time, Singleton reported him.

  Things had changed. The raiding was challenging now – the settlers were alert and armed – and conflicts between settlers and Aboriginal peoples were rising hot. Surveyor Major Thomas Mitchell, coming to the area shortly after, would blame Clarke directly for the lamentable situation. But when he was caught, his tribe tried to save him. With a police gun to his head and believing the authorities’ threats to massacre, Clarke sent them away.

  It was from Clarke’s accounts that Mitchell took his direction as he, in turn, set off to open up the north in November 1831, broaching the black-soil plains for two centuries of development. Meanwhile, Clarke was charged with every crime in New South Wales, and was sent to Norfolk Island and then Tasmania (where he briefly escaped for a final time). A celebrity, he told his story to the papers. He was hanged in public on the gallows in Hobart in 1835.

  But Clarke had threaded a lure line through the northwest that was soon braided thick by followers. Mitchell’s expedition reported rich, open country. Settlers were already massing, surging across the Cumberland and Liverpool plains and then, once that good land was snatched, eyeing the prospects north. And an Act of British Parliament in 1824 had established the Australian Agricultural Company for ‘the cultivation and improvement of Waste Lands in the Colony of New South Wales’, which at that time was the whole of eastern Australia.

  Freed convicts were the first to be granted land; more general free land grants had been made in 1792; by 1825, there were nineteen counties of the colony, and these ‘limits of location’ were supposed to hold. When the Blue Mountains were broached and the plains ‘discovered’, the colony’s survival was assured; but the government had to keep control of its population of convicted renegades and sharp opportunists. That control was swiftly lost beyond the Divide. In 1829, the boundary was extended; two years later Mitchell took Clarke’s lead north. Many of the first squatters were sly-grog men, runaway convicts and unauthorised stockmen. The Europeans, intoxicated by liberty, were rogue from the start.

  THERE IS A CURIOUS correspondence through history between the discipline of the body and the discipline of the land. As Keith Thomas points out in Man and the Natural World (1983), the people of pre-industrial Europe bound and whipped both their children and their vegetation. In the nineteenth century, it was convicts as well. Like renegade social elements, the land was to be controlled. The settlers flogged the scrub, arms raised with an axe rather than a scourge. The bush was ‘corrected’. It was ‘reformed’ and ‘improved’.

  Indeed, it was convicts who haplessly hoed or cheerfully harvested, showing the earth the redemptive way, the profit of suffering. Clearing the ground of its former errors. Smoothing a new plantation. The crimes and sins turned over, God’s green garden once more blooming above.

  SO THE FIRST FLEET had arrived with a very freighted mission, as well as over a thousand souls, Governor Phillip’s greyhounds, hundreds of petticoats, ten thousand bricks, a printing press and seven hundred hoes, though not a single plough for the establishment of a great wheat colony. Australia, with no old institutions to be challenged, no intransigent peasantry or feudal nobility, was for the expectant newcomers a tabula rasa, just as John Locke had imagined the human character was at birth.

  As the colony took a precarious hold on the distant continent, there must have been a glowing moment of optimism in hundreds of minds in London salons and government offices, in homesteads, hovels and victuallers’ headquarters. They were daydreaming of a great, new, distant enterprise beyond the horizon.

  It was a grand historical moment of churn. At the time Terra Australis was identified as the destination of that First Fleet, both industrialisation and more efficient agriculture were encouraging a general faith in the improvement, through reason and dedicated manipulation, of the human state: confidence ran high. It seemed all the world was laid out to be studied. First step: place imperfect people on imperfect land, and gain in a shared triumph. It was an Arcadian dream, related to the fantasies that had helped establish the colonies of the United States. The Exodus and Eden myths are both to be found in settler narratives: the Europeans in the antipodes were at once exiles, ejected from the green havens of the motherland, and arrivals in a bountiful paradise.

  In the wake of the hapless convict entrepreneurs came willing migrants. A William Wingate of Sussex, who emigrated to New South Wales at the age of thirty-seven, wrote to his relatives in England in proud delight: ‘if you new what i now nough, you would not stopped in England so long where now you might have been independent the same as i am thank god i can say i am independent of the world for i work when i like and i play if i like this is a comfort to be highly prized blessed be good i can say that this is trugh god being my witness …’

  Colonists didn’t abandon their relatives and possessions, sail across frightening expanses of ocean, watch their children die on board from dysentery and slip the little bodies over the side for a scenic frisson. Three or four months is a long time to sit on a tiny ship as it rocks precariously on the seas and imagine a future on solid, boundless land. Down on the other side of the globe, a man could be king. The unsettled could become homed.

  The colonisation of Australia happened at a historical moment peculiarly suited to exacerbate the collision of cultures that percusses through the Australian environment to this day. Instead of forging a common approach with the land’s existing inhabitants and a shared reverence for the eternal return of seasonal change, Europeans arrived at the period in their own history when all of this was being overturned. Tumbling away went ‘timeless’ agricultural practice, and in its place the ambition to push the land, to demonstrate progress, to elevate humankind upon the
mountain of industrial farming. ‘Fencing and enclosing land,’ wrote settler James Atkinson, ‘is the greatest and most important improvement that can be effected upon it.’ Just at the time when Europeans were more certain than ever of their superiority and agency, they fell upon a continent that would test these articles of faith to the utmost. Everything they held about the roles of God, land, action, science, human nature and reason was challenged. It could not have been more fraught, or more vulnerable, an endeavour.

  Nevertheless, plenty were keen to board those boats. Many of the 1.5 million free men, women and children who emigrated in the nineteenth century had versatile agrarian skills. After brimming at the edges of the Port Jackson settlement on Sydney Cove for twenty-five years, the colony exploded over the barrier of the Blue Mountains and spilled into the plains beyond. Moree district had a dozen settlers in 1832; six years later, more than a hundred.

  Stock and grazing were the Australian success story: the Merino wool of the colony had done the job hoped for by its champions, Joseph Banks and John Macarthur, in competing for the British Empire with European fine wool. Frontier after frontier of the interior had fallen under the hoofs of sheep and cattle. Now, too, familiar species were imported: the countryside soon rustled with skylarks, sparrows and blackbirds. Historian Geoffrey Bolton estimates that more than 1300 plants have been introduced to Australia since European invasion. There was nostalgia but also commercial advantage in bringing valuable species here. All the most profitable crops grown in this country are introduced species. So are most of the feral animals.